Call for Proposals: Private Spending on Skills Development in Latin America and the Caribbean

There is broad consensus that the level and distribution of skills in a country play a key role in determining growth and inequality. Unfortunately, there is clear evidence pointing to deficient and unequal accumulation of skills in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

What do we know about the payoffs of investing in skills development? Do these investments help to improve the labor market outcomes of individuals? In recent years, there has been an explosion in the academic literature that tries to identify the causal effects of different policy options on skills development. However, these lessons and results have not yet been used systematically to provide clear policy recommendations.

LAC countries are entering less-favorable phases of their business cycles wherein low growth is rapidly weakening their fiscal positions. In this context, there is a risk of reversing the positive trends in human capital investments observed in the 2000s.

Against this backdrop, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will focus its 2017 flagship report on how governments can better promote skills development. The report will take a life-cycle perspective on the skills development process. It will analyze skills development policies from early childhood to adulthood while taking advantage of the recent knowledge explosion on this topic. The report will tackle a set of first-order questions that are central to both Bank operations and policy design in the region.

On this scenario we are looking for research projects to generate evidence of a critical aspect of the skills development process: the skills development investments made by households and firms. The main questions guiding this research network are: how much do families and firms invest in skills development and how do they do it?

This call for proposals is open to research institutions only. The final number of proposals accepted will depend on the quality and proposed budget of the proposals received.

Proposals will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

Methodology and data (30 percent).

Country coverage (20 percent).

Description of the empirical analysis (20 percent).

Career history and experience of the participating researchers (30 percent).